My friend Sam leans back in his chair and folds his arms, both pleased with himself and disappointed in me at the same time. Irritatingly, he has a point.

Our property pathways had followed similar routes. He bought a top-floor flat in Streatham Hill in 2005, then started a family in a terraced house in SW16 two years later. I bought a top-floor flat in Tooting Bec, then upgraded to a Victorian mid-terrace in St Margarets with my husband, Chris, where we went on to have twins (Agatha and Benjamin, now four.)

And there we split. Sam remained an urbanite, buying a 3,000 sq ft detached period property in Streatham Common in 2013 for £700,000 – now worth, according to a Foxtons estimate, £1.5 million. He backed a gentrifying area of London and it's paid off.

In contrast, we are leaving London behind to upsize, priced out of our south-west London neighbourhood. A 3,000 sq ft, six-bedroom property in St Margarets can cost an eye-watering £3 million... and the £200,000 profit we made on the sale of our first family home gives us a shopping budget of £1 million – not including renovations.

What £1 million doesn't get you

I started to scour Rightmove for properties in Waverley, Surrey, to be near friends and family, rounding up our budget (what's an extra £500,000?)

Here was my initial checklist.

Must have wisteria

Must have boot room for future border collie

Must have walk-in larder with a marble slab for baking

Must have contemplative space, preferably window seat

Must have flat lawn for garden cricket. V important.

Easy to find such a home right? Wrong.

Buying in Surrey is not a smart move – and no, the irony of my profession has not escaped me. It's the most expensive of the Home Counties, with an average house price of £439,430. Waverley is more expensive still, with an average of £452,207.

So, unsurprisingly, a more sensible list of priorities started to emerge.

We wanted to be within walking distance of either a train station or a school to avoid the inconvenience and expense of both Chris and I driving every morning. We couldn't afford to be near a direct service to Waterloo and in the catchment area of a "good" school – or so we thought.

An indiscreet member of Neighbourhood Watch confirmed what the agent would not – that part of the road was prone to flooding

Pavements became a deal breaker. I fell in love with a property in Elstead but it was on a sharp bend of a main road with no pavement. An old post office in Busbridge, Godalming, had a similar issue. I also vetoed a Haslemere house with views over the Devil's Punch Bowl because it was tucked away up a winding lane. "What happens when it snows?" I sensibly (and uncharacteristically) argued.

Though we prepared to say goodbye to the boot room and the baking slab, the backyard cricket requirement remained on the list, counting out many Haslemere and Farnham properties with steep gardens or no discernible lawn.

A bump in the road

This was happening last summer, and although the search helped to crystallise a more realistic wishlist, we were told not to bid before accepting an offer on our house – known as being "proceedable."

This piece of advice was barked by a rather posh Strutt & Parker agent who, upon showing us a wonderful detached house in Chiddingfold, said: "This property sells itself". It rather begged the question of what he was doing there, then.

In the meantime, Chase Buchanan had secured a near-asking price offer on our St Margarets home. As the pressure to move mounted, we panicked and bid on a house in Lower Bourne (on the edge of Farnham).

Anna sold her family home in St Margarets for £880,000 through Chase Buchanan

Disaster struck. The structural survey showed it to be in a high risk flood zone. The vendor emailed to confirm the property had never been flooded, but the brickwork and drive of the house next door looked damaged. A local curtain-twitcher (aka an indiscreet member of Neighbourhood Watch) confirmed what the agent would not – that part of the road was prone to flooding. We pulled out.

In order to keep our buyers, a couple moving across London from Walthamstow, we broke the chain, selling our house without having secured our future home. By this point, autumn had fallen and I was heavily pregnant (and pretty grumpy). We moved into a rental with the twins in St Margarets until we found The One.

Finding The One

Reader, we did it. Our new forever home is not the idyllic rural cottage I had first pictured. But for slightly above our £1 million budget, we picked up a six-bedroom, Thirties detached house, walkable to Haslemere station on the Surrey-Hampshire border, with the best garden we'd seen in our seven-month search (300ft-long and surrounded by mature trees).

Aggy was sold on the tyre swing at the bottom of the garden; for Benny it was the overgrown wildlife pond. The house is around the corner from a two-form entry school so we can separate the twins. And the divorcing vendors were desperate to sell, reducing the original price by £100,000.

Aggy enjoying the tyre swing at the bottom of the garden

A happy-ever-after ending? Nothing is ever that easy. The two his 'n' hers studies have to go, as does the manky death-trap swimming pool, sunken into raised plastic decking. There's a steep drive to be fixed, and the red brick front is the ugliest facade on the road... that wisteria doesn't seem quite so whimsical now.

What I learnt

As amazing as our budget was, buying a five/six-bedroom house in the centre of our target towns in south-west Surrey for around £1 million doesn't get you as much as you'd expect. You'll probably end up with a property that needs some fixing up. Family-sized period houses that are walking distance from a station, in the catchment of a good school and on a big plot will still cause a frenzy.

Even in the summer following the EU referendum these rare delights could command sealed bids. A beautiful cottage on the sought-after Lynch Road in Farnham was advertised for £1.1 million. Savills conducted an open house on two consecutive Saturdays and it finally went for over £1.3 million.

I want to raise my children in the countryside. I grew up in an idyllic Nottinghamshire village and spent my weekends cycling down country lanes with my brother, hiding in hedgerows and – at the risk of sounding like Theresa May – scrambling over the back garden fence into the relative freedom of the farmer's fields behind.

When the kids are ready, I want them to discover London for themselves, rather than grow up taking it for granted. It's worth the wait.